Overview

Alven Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Guillaume Aubin and Charles Letourneur with a wide range of focuses across growth stages and sectors. The company’s most successful ventures have been in the SAAS, machine learning, e-commerce, media, and information technology sectors.

Across its six funds, Alven Capital currently has over €2bn under management and the company’s portfolio includes five unicorns. One such unicorn is Stripe, a popular international commerce company that helps to facilitate web payments globally. The most recent unicorn Alven Capital has invested in is Ankorstore, a wholesale B2B marketplace connecting international retailers with independent resellers.

Headquartered in Paris, France, Alven Capital states that the company’s goal is to partner with relentless European entrepreneurs connected to seed, series A, and early-stage startups. These startups must aspire to tackle global markets and almost always involve high growth potential developments in the digital-technology sector.

Brief History

Alven Capital was founded in Paris in 2000 by Guillaume Aubin and Charles Letourneur. The company has a strong connection to France and the wider European continent, with the majority of Alven Capital’s investments placed with European entrepreneurs, especially those companies included in Alven Capital’s new fund.

However, several of the companies in Alven Capital’s portfolio are American businesses, mainly based out of Silicon Valley. Alven Capital’s two founders, Aubin and Letourneur, are both French nationals who worked for major corporate financial advisory firms before splitting off independently to open Alven Capital. Both founders also attended Sciences PO, a highly selective French research university, and L’X, also known as École Polytechnique, a leading French science and technology institution. 

Significant Investments

Over 22 years in business, Alven Capital has managed to invest in five different unicorns, along with many other successful startups. Alven Capital has had more than 30 successful exits since its inception, having secured deals to flip portfolio companies to the likes of Facebook (now Meta), Salesforce, and IBM. Recent Alven Capital investments are mostly centered around engineering intelligence and financial technology startups, evidenced by two of the company’s major investments in 2022: a $9.1M Series A investment into engineering-technology company Neural Concept, and participation in a $16.5M seed round for data analytics platform, Enso.org.

Alven Capital in the News

In June of 2022, Alven Capital announced the creation of a new fund, the sixth such fund in the company’s 22-year history. Although Alven Capital initially announced a €300M target, the company set a hard cap at €350M after investors oversubscribed to the fund. With the addition of this new fund, Alven Capital now manages over €2bn in assets. In February of 2022 Alven Capital was the lead investor for innovative French NFT art marketplace LaCollection’s €10M seed round. LaCollection is attempting to create a curated, high-quality art marketplace by partnering with leading museums and galleries to offer digital versions of the world’s most famous pieces of physical artwork. Prior to Alven Capital’s investment, which will be used to further develop LaCollection’s platform, LaCollection had already secured a long-term partnership with The British Museum, and the support of major blockchain technology companies Ledger and Sorare.u